The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 2

was, what color or religion the father was. Grandfather was numb before fate. Not only was I to be his living curse, but also I could be any wretched shape and color of curse. And being a true son of Norse pessimism—his own father, Gunther, a dismal trawler captain who had anticipated all the days of his life the North Sea storm that drowned him—Grandfather expected the worst. He feared that I would be a Jew. And if not that horror, he feared that I would be dark-skinned. And if not that horror, he feared that I would be American. These might seem random demons, yet one must consider that for many years Grandfather had been hard-pressed to make sense of western civilization. He was a fiery preacher of the coming Kingdom of Heaven ruled by Him whom Grandfather called “Lord God.” Prior to his relatively plush appointment to the preaching post of one of Stockholm’s most conservative churches, Grandfather had labored twenty-one years sailing, sledding, and skiing the most remote precincts of the Swedish realm on the Gulf of Bothnia, preaching the Word to convicts, misanthropes, and madmen. His colleagues called him “Mord the Hard-Fisherman.” He had christened his own ship Angel of Death. After all this time in the wilderness, he had become convinced that the coming Kingdom looked a certain way, meaning white-skinned, clean, and well-stocked with lumber and fish. During his few years in Stockholm, he had had reason to reconsider his vision; he had not. One might attempt to excuse Grandfather’s irrational attachment to his earliest perceptions of heaven by arguing that he was stuck back in the Gulf of Bothnia, and in the gulf of time, before the heartbreak caused by his beloved Zoe’s desertion. Grandfather would be the first to refuse such a defense. He was persuaded, out of the pride that was his worst sin, that if the Jews, or the dark-skinned races, or the Americans, or a combination of same, ever gained control of the West, or of at least the North, then Stockholm would suffer and would deserve (perhaps even would welcome, like suicidal hermits) the same conflagration that consumed so many of the Bible’s infidel cities.

I confess in detail Grandfather’s shameful delusion, because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, the bigot harvesting what he sowed. I note also that the fruit was the most bitter for Grandfather because it did not proceed from hatred, which requires some passing knowledge of one’s adversary, instead was engendered by his absolute ignorance, his bottomless fear of the unknown. Grandfather did not hate Jews, Negroes, Arabs, Orientals, Indians, Americans. To my knowledge, he had never talked with one. Accordingly, they terrified him. And I submit that, for reasons having to do with his innate fear of hedonism, luxury, eroticism, fleshly profligacy, Grandfather did not fear the Jews or the dark-skinned races with anything equivalent to the hardness of his heart when confronted with the spectre of the Americans who were then pouring into Stockholm, on the run from the American tyrant, President Richard M. Nixon. Grandfather feared the Americans so much that he was willing to suspend his common sense about blasphemy—he had, as a seminarian, preached resistance at all costs in the face of German and Russian blasphemers—and to proclaim from his pulpit that Nixon was fit punishment for the American sinners. He said that he grieved that so many of the rascals escaped their horned chief executive.

My grandfather was a godly man. I loved him despite himself. He was also cruel, narrow-minded, vindictive, and too often hysterically vain. He preached the God of Love, the Sermon on the Mount, and the parables of Jesus with the same intensity with which he opined unjust, merciless politics. He could be a thunderous bully; he could be a dauntless ally. His strength was his resolve, his weakness was his lack of a sense of proportion, which could become a lack of a sense of decency. He stormed through a life of shame and triumph. Grandfather was as relentless as he was ruthless, was as vigilant as he was an ever-dangerous trespasser. He was shrewd, sudden, articulate, and long-remembering. Grandfather was fury itself. He got what he gave, and much more. It is not for me to judge him finally. Over the length of my life I have had to dispute nearly everything my grandfather said about Mother, Father, and peace of mind; and yet I know I am lucky for having been obliged to run such a long-winded course. All along the way I have found treasures.

Dr. Anders Horshead was first down to pronounce me an average boy. This meant that I was not hook-nosed, chocolate, or radically not-Norse. Radar, my maternal uncle, then twelve but already given to the angelic keenness that would carry him on to the stage as the sort of Northman playwrights celebrate as tragic heroes, came down next to say he was going to chapel to give thanks for Lamba’s health. Radar was not then permitted to forget the lie that his sickly birth and youth had caused his mother’s death (a deception by Grandfather that fooled no one but the fools that cared for such gossip). Grandfather and Anders Horshead then emptied a fresh bottle of vodka in order to toast—and this was very Norse of them—what had so far been avoided.

By daylight, and the first of a heavy snow, Grandfather exhausted his peculiar joy and returned to stoical fretting. “What should be done with the little bastard?” said Grandfather. (I do not know he actually said this; it pleases me that he might have. More likely, he called me “it.”)

“Don’t talk so,” said Anders Horshead. “Let nature be.”

“I would sooner it burn in Hell than let her keep it.”

“You’ve a fine grandson. I envy you,” said Anders Horshead. “She’s not right! Something must be done! Shall be done!” Lamba was not half-witted. She was a precocious, motherless child who mocked her father’s will and enjoyed letting him know